Due to increased customer throughput relative to traditional drive-thru configurations, fast food restaurants are adopting a side-by-side drive-thru configuration. While the side-by-side drive-thru has benefits regarding the maximum drive-thru customer per hour rate a restaurant can achieve, it presents new challenges to restaurants.
One example of a problem of the side-by-side drive-thru presents is potential for imbalance in the lanes as one lane may contain a larger number of vehicles than another lane for a variety of reasons. Alternatively, one lane may appear to have fewer vehicles, but have a longer service time due to having to fulfill more, or larger, orders per vehicle than another lane.
Presently, to address these new challenges, managers may deploy an employee to go outside to manually manage the drive-thru lanes. However, deploying an employee to go outside to manually manage the drive-thru lanes lowers productivity from the restaurant as one fewer employee is available to take orders, prepare food, complete orders, and the like.